Why AI Investors Need Data — Not Instinct — To Pick Winning States
Why AI Investors Need Data — Not Instinct — To Pick Winning States
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 15:05:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
An Amazon Web Services data center is shown in Stone Ridge, Virginia. Virginia has aggressively courted AI investment. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
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In 2025, artificial intelligence captured 61 percent of all global venture capital investment, pulling in $258 billion out of a $427 billion total market, according to a February 2026 report from the OECD. That’s double the share only three years earlier. AI companies that are based in the U.S. won an astounding 75 percent of that global AI venture capital. The EU finished second at 6 percent. So, it’s clear – U.S. states are ground-zero for the AI investment game.
The deals are big. Investments topping $100 million now make up about 73 percent of total AI investment value, showing a concentration in a handful of category leaders. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to collectively spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
But scale of commitment is not the same as quality of commitment. Shockingly, a significant portion of that capital is being deployed with surprising imprecision. Goldman Sachs warned that many data center investments risk failing to generate expected returns if the industry can’t sufficiently monetize AI models. Oracle shares fell nearly 40 percent over a three-month period on fears that its massive AI data center bets won’t pay off. Remember the telecom overbuild of the early 2000s? It’s worth looking up.
Do we think these billions are being tossed around on whims, without adequate research and analysis? We do not. But: Is there a deficit of state-by-state, category-by-category data to be analyzed when deciding which state to invest in? Evidence suggests so.
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